The Way We Bared Our Souls (6 page)

Wait, Thomas knew my full name?

“You’re right,” I said through gritted teeth. “This was a mistake. Please put me down.” What if the breeze blew us into an electrical line or something, caught us on fire, caught everything on fire?

“What do you know about my life?” Thomas said. “That I came from a war zone, that I’m an orphan, that I should be ever so grateful to be safe in the US of A? To be taken care of by Big Daddy America?”

I nodded my head, barely listening, still unable to open my eyes or hold on.

“Can I tell you what you
don’t
know?” Thomas said. “When I was a boy, rebel soldiers killed my parents in front of me. They shot them and then burned them in our house outside Monrovia while they were still alive, screaming. My little brother, Henri, and I escaped through the jungle, but we heard their agonizing cries as we ran. And then they stopped.”

In one of my nightmares, my father burned alive in the forest, unable to halt the flames of wildfire. Here in the real world of Thomas and the sunset and a rising balloon, I opened my eyes. Thomas gripped the cord that fed gas into the burner. The flatness in his gaze was gone, replaced by something feverish and urgent.

“After weeks alone, starving, Henri and I were picked up by an opposing army. They said we could avenge our parents’ murders. That the men who had killed them were less than dogs and we needed to get retribution before they slaughtered more members of our families. The army soldiers marched us into a military camp and gave us guns. I’d never seen a gun up close. It was heavy. Savage. A few days later my best friend from school arrived at the camp. When I saw him I embraced him. I thought he’d died in the fire that had consumed our village. My commander saw our embrace. He didn’t like that we were still . . . human. He handed me a machine gun and told me that if I didn’t shoot my friend on the spot, he would kill me. . . . Shall I continue?”

I nodded. The earth was farther away every second.

I am a broken T.V.
Not like the nice ones in America.
Like the ones I watched in Monrovia.
My static is loud, violent.
Black and white.
Good and evil.

“Henri was standing right there. I knew that he needed me.” Thomas’s eyes were lit up as if he were reliving the scene in real time. “I was his big brother, his only family left. And so I shot my friend. I shot him in the leg, and he fell to the ground, screaming in pain. My commander cracked my head open with the butt of his machine gun. ‘In the heart,’ he said, pointing at my friend’s chest. I told him that I couldn’t do it. My friend was writhing on the ground, begging me to spare him. Blood was shooting from his leg. I must have hit the femoral artery by mistake. I didn’t know anything about the body’s most vulnerable points . . . at the time. The commander grabbed my hair and jerked me to the ground, began kicking me in the ribs again and again. My little brother cried for him to stop. The commander shook the gun in my hands. ‘Kill your friend,’ he said. ‘Or I’ll kill your brother.’ I aimed the gun and shot my friend through the chest.”

I trembled in the corner of the basket, wanting Mom and Dad, wanting to be grounded again, feeling my body convulsing beneath me like a storm cloud.

“That was the first person I killed,” he said.

“Why are you telling me all this?” I whispered. I was one hundred feet above the ground, a killer’s captive.

“Because you don’t know what you’re messing with. You’re in over your head. When I fall asleep at night, I see my finger pulling a trigger again and again. I see the blood of my friends pouring from their bodies like sap from trees. I see myself grinding an old man’s face into the ground until he chokes on mud. And sometimes I think I’m capable of doing it all again. For no reason whatsoever. Just because.”

He still gripped the knife that he’d used to cut one of the tethers. He stepped closer to me.

“My new siblings are afraid of me,” he whispered. “They hear my screams at night. In those seconds before I wake up, I’m fighting for my life. Every time. If they got near me in those seconds, when I’m still un-conscious, operating on instinct, I fear I might break their necks.”

His eyes welled up with tears.

“You say you might be dying,” he said. “But I’m already dead. I have nothing to lose.”

Just then I felt a violent jerk on the basket. I stumbled headlong into Thomas’s chest, my stomach barely missing his knife. We had stopped ascending. One rope held us tentatively to the ground.

“If I’m going to do this ritual with you,” he said, “and try to lift the . . . weight, as you call it, then I need to know that you’re not afraid of me.”

“I’m not afraid of you,” I said. And I wasn’t. I could feel the chill of the knife through my T-shirt, but his chest was warm, inviting, safe.

“I’m a monster,” Thomas said.

“It’s okay,” I said. “Maybe I’m a monster too.” We slowly began sinking.

WHEN I CAME HOME FROM
the airfield with an assurance from Thomas that he would join me in the morning, and would approach Kit about coming too, I found Mom sitting at the kitchen table in her church clothes, an empty bag of barbecue potato chips in front of her. She looked up as if she’d been waiting idly for hours for me to walk in the door.

“If this is an intervention,” I said, kissing the top of her head and wiping the crumbs from her cheek, “you are way off the mark. I’m not pregnant, nor am I an alcoholic. But give me a few more months. Isn’t patience one of the cardinal Catholic virtues?”

Mom smiled. “Very funny, sweetheart. It’s not an intervention. But, believe it or not, Miss Independent, your dad and I are worried about you.”

“Isn’t that how every intervention begins?” I said. “In fact, I think there’s a show on MTV about this. Where is Dad anyway?” I began filling a glass from the faucet.

“He’s on the mountain with his crew.”

I bristled, and the water overflowed my glass. “On the mountain? Why?”

“There’s a small fire up there today. They’re just rerouting and containing it. But he’ll be fine, dear. You know how cautious your dad is. Safety first.”

This was true. One Christmas he’d given me and Mom life jackets, and we’d never even been on a boat before. He made sure the trunk of my car was stocked with bright orange safety vests at all times, in case I got a flat tire or something and needed to await help on the side of the road. The giant signal flares he’d given me for my fifteenth birthday were supplements to this little kit. He probably would’ve been quite disturbed if he’d known that I’d just been up in the air with a teenage balloon pilot. But right now the memory was too charged and too confounding to share with anyone.

“Consuelo, your dad and I know that you don’t want to talk to us about your symptoms. But we think it’s important for you to talk to
someone
. A friend or. . . .” She let the sentence fade into the kitchen linoleum. I had a feeling she was about to say “relative,” but we both knew that Aunt Karine was the only family member I had a history of opening up to. And we both knew she was dead.

“I’m trying to respect your wishes,” Mom continued, “but I don’t think it’s healthy to keep this possible threat to your health a secret. You go back to the hospital for testing in just over a week. I think you should be prepared for the eventuality that your life is going to change. Maybe radically. And if that happens, you’re going to need support. Why not ask for it?”

Little did she know, support was what I was trying to get, except I was going through coyote rather than human channels.

“When . . . your aunt was dying,” Mom said, still unable to say her sister’s name, “she surrounded herself with friends. You know how much people liked her. She was just a . . . a warm soul.” Mom paused for a moment, digging around in the potato chip bag before remembering that it was empty. “And I know that having a support system comforted her. As she made her . . . transition.”

“‘Transition’? Mom, that’s an extremely poor euphemism if I’ve ever heard one.” She was a nurse who dealt with life and death every day, but she still couldn’t accept her sister’s mortality. Could I?

Aunt Karine had been independent, feisty, had lived all over—even on a houseboat in a Mexican lake. All my life she’d sent me letters and postcards chronicling her extensive travels. She’d been an adventurer and an iconoclast and even knew how to hula-hoop with fire.

Then she’d died in hospice care in the spare bedroom across from mine.

My aunt was only thirty-three when she succumbed to multiple sclerosis. And we never had time to get used to the idea of her dying. She was Mom’s kid sister and had been in exemplary health her entire life. She’d been living in an apartment in San Francisco, thriving at her job as a community organizer and moonlighting as a street performer, visiting us at least twice a year in a whirlwind of pure energy and eccentric gifts like sock puppets and glow-in-the-dark models of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Then, last spring, her vision started to blur. Her legs got shaky. Maybe because she was this fetching, vibrant, positive person, the doctors were reluctant to run the serious tests. They didn’t see the red flags. Instead, when she mentioned spinal pain and lumbar soreness, they thought she might have slipped a disk. But they wised up eventually.

It’s not that an earlier diagnosis would necessarily have prolonged Karine’s life. MS is incurable, and my aunt had an extremely acute, accelerated form. She was wheelchair bound within a month. Wheelchair bound, the woman who seemed to live half her waking hours dancing on air. The woman who could compel a crowd of total strangers to attend to her movements on the sidewalk. The woman who had first taught me how to hear music with my whole body. The woman who sounded to me like a symphony.

Not long after the diagnosis, it became clear that Aunt Karine couldn’t care for herself or remain in her San Francisco apartment, so my parents flew her to Santa Fe and moved her in with us. Karine tried to insist that we turn her over to a nursing facility, but my mother wasn’t entertaining that idea for a second. She seemed to think that only under her own personal supervision would her little sister get better. Mom is a nurse, after all. She had faith in her medicine, and she had faith in the healing powers of Santa Fe.

Karine had lots of friends in the area, as she seemed to have in every area—a gaggle of cowgirls and artists and dancers and buskers and Indians from four surrounding states. They would stream in and out of our house to say hello. Then, when Karine’s medical situation became more dire, people began streaming in to say goodbye.

Which was more than I could do.

Mom grew quiet at the kitchen table, and I immediately felt bad for reprimanding her. She took a sip from her can of ginger ale, then cleared her throat and brushed the oily crumbs from the front of her dress.

“My point is, I know it helped Karine to keep her lines of communication open, to talk to her friends.”

“Maybe,” I said. But I’d now told two people besides my parents and the doctor about my symptoms—Jay and Thomas—and I didn’t feel much better, physically anyway. My head still throbbed. I still felt pins and needles on my arms at random moments. Like this one, for instance.

“Do you ever talk to Kaya Johnson anymore?” Mom said. “Maybe she would have some insight into what you’re going through since she also has a . . . condition.”

Kaya! Of course! The most obvious person ever. Due to her rare form of congenital analgesia—an inability to experience pain—Kaya literally could not feel a knife cut into her skin. She would be perfect for Jay’s ritual. Her condition informed her entire existence, and not in a good way. I knew in my heart—and from long association—that she would give anything to feel something. In addition to that, she was Pueblo on her mom’s side and Navajo on her dad’s (who lived with his second family on the rez). I couldn’t help thinking that her Native American heritage might make her more receptive to my proposal.

“You’re absolutely right, Mom,” I said. “You’re a wise woman. Maybe even a saint. Kaya is exactly the person I need right now.”

Maybe I was overdoing the gratitude a little, because Mom seemed astonished that I’d taken her advice. “Oh,” she said, seeming self-conscious. “Okay. Well, please give her my love. I haven’t seen her in so long. She’s such an exceptional person.” She balled up the potato chip bag in one hand and clasped my hand with the other. I gave her a kiss and dashed out the door.

• • •

I drove to Kaya’s house, which was on the outskirts of town—not far from Fernando’s Pharmacy, in fact. Even though it was a warm Friday evening, I knew that Kaya would be home. With the exception of school hours and doctors’ appointments, she could pretty much always be found at 57 Crockett Way. Mrs. Johnson had outlawed any hobbies or after-school activities, deeming them too risky for her daughter’s fragile state. After all, a stray projectile at a football game had the potential to give Kaya lasting organ damage. And Mrs. Johnson didn’t trust other people to monitor Kaya. Which wasn’t so paranoid of her, really, considering kids used to stick paper clips and sharpened pencils through Kaya’s skin in the back of the elementary school classroom to see if they could get her to cry. (They never could.)

I should explain something about Kaya’s condition. When she was three, her mother, oblivious, sent her to preschool with a broken arm. After a few days, a classroom aide thought the arm looked a little wonky and took Kaya to the school nurse, who immediately sent her to the hospital for X-rays. For a full week, little Kaya had been playing, sleeping, and eating breakfast cereal with a compound radial fracture. The pain would have leveled any other kid, but Kaya hadn’t complained once, so her mother had no idea the arm was broken. A few weeks later Kaya almost bit her tongue clean off, never feeling a thing. You could still see the stripe of scar tissue whenever she licked an ice cream cone.

By the time her rare condition was identified and precautions were put in place, Kaya had experienced the full range of covert injuries. She’d stepped on rusty nails, dipped her hands in boiling water, scratched her soft spots during nightmares until she stained her sheets with blood, and had at least one emergency eye surgery for an infection caused by a foreign ocular object she couldn’t feel.

I never saw Kaya cry. Not at sleepovers when other girls began teasing her about the gloves she had to sleep in so she wouldn’t scratch herself raw. Not on the playground when she fell over—and once knocked out a tooth after jumping off the swing set into a concrete barrier. Blood poured out of her mouth, and she just kept playing as if nothing was wrong. At the time I was more upset than she was—I started weeping and then got a sympathy toothache that lasted days.

When Kaya was five or six, Mrs. Johnson became hypervigilant. For instance, she was the first one to rush to Kaya on the playground that day and scrabble around the sand pit looking for the lost tooth. I still remember the way the silver rings on her fingers flashed in the sun as she dug frantically through the sand.

But her overprotective single mom couldn’t shield Kaya from getting a reputation as a Grade A weirdo. Kaya was the white buffalo of our town. To most people, she was sort of creepy, but also sort of sacred. Locals were proud to claim her, in a queer way—she’d even been featured in a
People
magazine story about teenagers who can’t feel pain—but they kept their distance because she was taboo. No one wanted to be the white buffalo. Or even party with the white buffalo. Better to corral her off, keep her as offbeat eye candy.

Mrs. Johnson was portrayed in the
People
article as a sort of beleaguered, woe-is-me single mother who was both gifted and cursed with this special-needs daughter. She struck me as the type who was always aiming for the sympathy vote. I didn’t entirely trust her, and I didn’t think Kaya did either. Unfortunately, when I rang the doorbell, it was Mrs. Johnson who answered.

“Hi!” I said, trying not to betray the unkind nature of my thoughts.

“Consuelo McDonough. It’s been a long time.” Kaya’s mom paused, maybe waiting for me to give an explanation, but I said nothing. “What brings you here?”

Over the past few weeks, I’d realized that certain people made my symptoms flare up. Mrs. Johnson, for instance, made my middle finger twitch ever so slightly on my right hand. But she was Kaya’s maternal security detail, and I had to be civil.

“Oh, I’m just here to see Kaya,” I said politely. “We’re . . . working on a school project together. Is she home?”

Mrs. Johnson eyed my backpack, as if to check it for sharp objects. Like I was going to smuggle in a chainsaw to hack her daughter to pieces. “Kaya,” she yelled up the stairs. “Your old”—emphasis on the “old”—“friend Consuelo is here.” The trepidation in her tone made me wonder if she secretly wished to keep Kaya in one of those giant sterile bubbles.

“Thanks,” I said, still trying my utmost to contain my frustration at having a bodyguard between me and my oldest friend in Santa Fe. “Okay if I just go up?” Before Mrs. Johnson could answer I was rocking the stairs two at a time, like I used to.

“Be my guest,” Mrs. Johnson murmured as she retreated toward the kitchen. “But bedtime is promptly at ten. And I don’t want her leaving the house.”

I pushed Kaya’s bedroom door open after a cautious knock, and she started. Apparently she hadn’t heard her mother announce me, due to the headphones in her ears.

“Lo?” she said timidly. “What are you doing here?”

I plopped down on Kaya’s purple beanbag—no hard edges in her bedroom, obviously.

“I need to talk to you,” I said.

We probably hadn’t spoken more than twenty words to each other in a year and a half, and now I was in her bedroom, where we used to play with plastic show horses and magic kits for hours on end. Then, when we were a little older, where we tried to summon the spirits of the dead with a Ouija board and predict our futures with tarot cards. I’d still never met anyone else with a similar lust for paranormal experiences. But it had been years since I’d even read my horoscope in the newspaper.

“Whoa,” she said. “Is there a blue moon this month that commanded you to come here or something? Is everything all right?”

I’d forgotten how pretty Kaya was. I used to tell her that all the time—how I wished I had her high cheekbones, fawn-colored skin, and intense cat eyes. Though I felt pretty good about my physical appearance, sometimes I still coveted her looks. My strawberry blond hair and green eyes often drove me nuts—I was a freak Irish girl in the midst of the Southwest. But the same shy body language that Kaya enlisted to protect her fragile person—head lowered, arms crossed over chest, shoulders hunched, et cetera—also served to camouflage her finer features. Now, swiveling around in her desk chair, she brushed her black bangs from her face as if she wanted me to notice those cat eyes once more, as if she wanted to show me that she was still the same pretty person I used to compliment. Then her hand shot nervously back into her lap.